Friday, 15 May 2009

How much time could CTO save you?

We did a quick survey of some of our users to find out how much time they used to spend on inputting invoices.

Previously we'd found that a staggering 80% of online store operators either copy and pasted orders from their admin to their accounts or printed them off and date inputted them.

60% took about 3 minutes but a hefty 25% took 5 minutes or more.

So we crunched some figures and came up with this little table (based on taking 3 minutes per invoice):

Hours Per Month

Days Per Year

Weeks Per Year

2 Orders Per Day

3

5.2

1

5 Orders Per Day

8

13

Over 2

10 Orders Per Day

15

26

Over 5

20 Orders Per Day

30

52

Over 10

50 Orders Per Day

76

130

26

100 Orders Per Day

152

261

52

If you factor in the time spent correcting inaccurate invoices (data inputting always leads to some errors) and generating credit notes, then there are even greater savings.

These are back of the envelope calculations of course. We don't think many companies will have full time data inputters putting invoices in manually.

However, I used to run a store that regularly did 30 orders per day and at busy periods over 150 orders. We didn't input any invoices, but put in aggregate monthly figures into our Sage accounts.

The problem with that?- We regularly over-estimated VAT due to returns or exchanges;- After the VAT inspection we were told that our records weren't accurate enough and we *should* be inputting each invoice;- Our web stores lacked the reporting sophistication to allow us to spot our best customers;- We couldn't easily aggregate sales from our 2 different web sites and Ebay.

If you have a brand new store or only do a few orders a month, then CTO is still a great time saving solution - why not try our Free 45 Day trial!?

Saturday, 2 May 2009

Bugfix: Discounts

[EDIT 27/5/09: The Tech Team have asked me to make clear that CTO does now support all OSCommerce Voucher & Coupon contributions in the known universe... although if you have an unknown one, we're happy to add it!]

It may be a Bank Holiday Weekend, but we are hard at work bug fixing and improving CTO in preparation for the launch on May 5th.

We expect the discounts bugfix to be implemented by Monday.

Currently CTO does not support discount coupons or vouchers. It would be impossible to support all the myriad voucher contributions out there for OSCommerce.

Instead, what we're doing is taking the total order value and subtracting the amount paid. Anything left over is a discount or coupon.

By default, the discount will show VAT - so a £10 voucher is £8.70 + VAT.

However, if you have a situation where you sell £300 of baby clothes (zero rated for tax) and charge £5 plus 75p VAT for delivery, and provide a 50% discount, the VAT on the discount will be the maximum VAT charged on the order.

Baby Clothes: £300Delivery: £5VAT: £0.75Subtotal: £305.75

After applying a 50% discount, the total paid is £152.88.

The discount line on KashFlow would show it as: £152.13 + 75p VAT, so it would look like: